Microsoft had been having a tough time tackling Google’s leadership in Search. In the past they have given out several offers, UI changes to attract users.
Well, the battle just got a whole lot dirtier, as The Financial Times has uncovered news that Microsoft has approached several news content providers, offering them money if they opt to “de-index” their sites from Google.
It all started with News content providers having a dispute with Google. News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch has threatened with legal action to prevent Google from “stealing” articles published in his newspapers.
Microsoft took utmost advantage of the opportunity, and added the fuel to the fire. Even though it was News Corp. that first approached Microsoft about the plan, The FT got to know that Microsoft has approached other news content providers to extend the deal by bribing them. However, on being questioned, both News Corp. and Microsoft declined to comment.
As usual, Google was neutral to the news, they didn’t have anything to say about this specific story, they had a general statement “Economically it’s not a big part of how we generate revenue,” Matt Brittin, Google’s UK director.
Though it’s important for search engines to index news, the thing gets more serious for news content providers. due to growth of eMedia, many of them have been struggling for a long time and now finally trying to make profit from the internet and if it fails, they are in serious trouble.
Justification holds in the hands of News content providers, and If this continues, News agency will gain (by both saving their premium content and getting Money from Microsoft) but search quality overall lags.
What do you think? What is more important?
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I'd be ECSTATIC to see Fox de-indexed from Google. It will only serve to make News Corp less profitable by getting less web ad revenue from Google users. Google searches still account for almost 70% of web searches. Does MS really think Fox news is THAT valuable to people that they will switch search engines to see Fox results? And does Fox really believe de-indexing will inspire people to pay for Fox articles when there are hundreds of clone articles listed on Google News?
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If people want to read the news on News Corp websites they will go to the News Corp websites directly – they won't be using a search engine to find it. This is evidenced by the fact that only about 1/9th of their traffic comes from search engines (I don't have the reference website for this off the top of my head).
People are not going to suddenly start searching Bing so they can search for News Corp content – they'll go direct to the horse's mouth. If MS thinks that's what will happen they're being pretty naive.
And I do have to laugh how News Corp are claiming Google steal their content when all Google are doing is providing a funnel to send people to them to read the full content in the first place.
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This is actually a fairly smart strategy. The difference between bing/yahoo!/google is fairly minimal, and there is an extremely low barrier to switching between them. If just one site that a user considers critical (fox news for conservatives, msdn for windows developers, etc) is de-listed, it may well make them say “You know what, I will just use yahoo!/bing so I get inclusive results”. Hit enough key sites, that people WANT to see inclusively in their search results… might have an impact.
Of course, then comes hostile indexing, paywalls and all other sorts of noise, but I don't think the idea is outright silly.
It is a game of chicken,
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For last few years I use just Google, because all serach engines I love(altavista, yahoo, …) sucks, and can not find anything.
I do not net Fox news, …
I need informations,(if any) thats the difference, ..
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How does getting de-indexed from google save them premium content? Really just takes away 1/9 of the traffic coming to them without much of an advantage!
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the news websites no matter how big they are will lose lots of visitors if they go against google, i don't see any good reason why these sites should go against google anyway… google never displays content on their sites/search pages, they just send the visitors straight to the source website…
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Hi guy's,
The difference between bing/yahoo!/google is fairly minimal, and there is an extremely low barrier to switching between them. If just one site that a user considers critical (fox news for conservatives, msdn for windows developers, etc) is de-listed, it may well make them say “You know what, I will just use yahoo!/bing so I get inclusive results”. Hit enough key sites, that people WANT to see inclusively in their search results… might have an impact.
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It was very much surprising to read this post.I have never ever thought that Microsoft will have to take this step.But I thing this all must surely for the benefit of Microsoft.it was very informative to know about this latest update.
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It was very much surprising to read this post.I have never ever thought that Microsoft will have to take this step.But I thing this all must surely for the benefit of Microsoft.it was very informative to know about this latest update.
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